00:00Google just found the wildest way to power their supercomputers, and you need to know
00:04what's happening.
00:05In 2021, Google partnered with a startup called Furvo Energy, who started drilling an 8,000
00:11foot hole in the ground in Nevada, about a mile and a half deep.
00:14Then they took an abrupt turn and went sideways for a while before drilling a second hole
00:19and drilling sideways some more, all for something called Enhanced Geothermal Energy.
00:25Furvo then made a bunch of cracks in the impermeable rock between the two wells so that
00:29water could pass through the fractures, basically making an underground easy-bake oven out of
00:35the hot Nevada desert.
00:36Room temperature water goes down one hole, and hot water comes back up to the surface
00:41to generate electricity, since it's much hotter underground than above ground.
00:45It's basically a carbon-free infinite energy hack, since the inside of our earth is going
00:50to be warm for the next billion years or so.
00:53After that, it's somebody else's problem.
00:55At this point, the water is pumping through rock about as hot as your stovetop, about 400
00:59degrees Fahrenheit.
01:00And when it gets back to the surface, this is where the real science happens.
01:04Furvo is using a new organic two-cycle system called an ORC, or Organic Rankin Cycle Power
01:10Plan.
01:11Don't worry, there's no quiz on this later.
01:13Just know that the heated water from underground, or geofluid, is passed through a heat exchanger,
01:18where there's a second liquid that has a lower boiling point than water, usually isobutane
01:23or something similar.
01:24This second liquid can then vaporize into steam that's used to turn energy generating turbines
01:29inside another completely closed loop.
01:32And then both loops condense, cool down, and keep recirculating to repeat the process all
01:37over again.
01:38It's like a giant heat pump the size of 400 fully grown T-Rexes, because Americans will
01:43use anything but the metric system.
01:44And you might be like, but how much energy is this actually generating?
01:48The US Department of Energy found that geothermal energy as a whole could provide 120 gigawatts
01:54worth of juice by 2050, which would be 16% of our national energy usage.
02:00And the best part is that no water is lost to evaporation in our atmosphere.
02:04And all of the geofluid flowing through the power plant is injected over and over again
02:08back into the ground in a cycle.
02:10And this is just the beginning.
02:12The industrial scale Google data center in Nevada is one of the first that proves this concept
02:17can actually work.
02:18Now Google and Firvo are partnering on another project in Nevada that will generate 25 times
02:23the amount of enhanced geothermal electricity as this one.
02:27Pretty cool.
02:28It took about 2 years to construct, but now Google has 24-7 carbon free electricity.
02:33And I hope we start seeing a lot more enhanced geothermal out there in the wild.
02:38Now I just got to figure out how to build one under my own house.
02:40And if you're curious to learn more, I'll leave some links in the description.
